Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture

By Douglas Kellner

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

Components of a Critical Cultural Studies

At its strongest, cultural studies contains a three-fold project of analyzing the production and political economy of culture, cultural texts, and the audience reception of those texts and their effects. This comprehensive approach avoids too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion of others. To avoid such limitations, I would thus propose a multi-perspectival approach that (a) discusses production and political economy, (b) engages in textual analysis, and (c) studies the reception and use of cultural texts. [3]

Production and Political Economy

Because it has been neglected in many modes of recent cultural studies, it is important to stress the importance of analyzing cultural texts within their system of production and distribution, often referred to as the political economy of culture. [4] Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the texts that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay. Rather than being antithetical approaches to culture, political economy can actually contribute to textual analysis and critique. The system of production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits there will be as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects the text may generate. 

Study of the codes of television, film, or popular music, for instance, is enhanced by studying the formulas and conventions of production. These cultural forms are structured by well-defined rules and conventions, and the study of the production of culture can help elucidate the codes actually in play. Because of the demands of the format of radio or music television, for instance, most popular songs are three to five minutes, fitting into the format of the distribution system. Because of their control by giant corporations oriented primarily toward profit, film and television production in the U.S. is dominated by specific genres such as talk and game shows, soap operas, situation comedies, action/adventure series, reality TV, and so on. This economic factor explains why there are cycles of certain genres and subgenres, sequelmania in the film industry, crossovers of popular films into television series, and a certain homogeneity in products constituted within systems of production marked by rigid generic codes, formulaic conventions, and well-defined ideological boundaries.

For more

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm

New Formalism or Neo-formalism

New Formalism, or Neo-formalism, was a late-twentieth century development in American poetry that sought to draw fresh attention to traditional forms of verse in terms of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic symmetry. Disheartened both by the overwhelming popularity of free verse during the Cold War and by the notion that metrical patterns were somehow antithetical to organic truth, New Formalist poets and their advocates rallied behind the traditions, aesthetics, and practices they believed had been all but abandoned by many of their contemporaries.

Though poets like Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Mona Van Duyn had continued to explore the possibilities of form during the 1960s and ’70s, they had been schooled by New Critics, including Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, who had been outspoken in defense of formalist verse all along. The poets who considered themselves New Formalists in the ’80s and ’90s were drawn to form in response to the free verse standard that was handed to them.

New Formalism’s most noted poets include Charles Martin, Brad Leithauser, Timothy Steele, Molly Peacock, Phillis Levin, Marilyn Hacker, Mark Jarman, and Dana Gioia, among others.

In the preface to the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996), editors Jarman and David Mason wrote, “It is no surprise that the most significant development in recent American poetry has been a resurgence of meter and rhyme, as well as narrative, among large numbers of young poets, after a period when these essential elements of verse had been suppressed.” Critics of the movement decried neo-formalists for privileging metrical artifice and (sometimes) stylized speech over otherwise more ambitious, visionary, and free forms. Some have gone so far as to call New Formalism patriarchal. Still, others make the case that free verse is no more or less a form than traditional (metrical, rhythmical) verse.

For further reading, consult Gioia’s “Notes on the New Formalism” (Hudson Review, 1987) or his book of essays, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Noteworthy criticism of the movement includes Ira Sadoff’s, “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia," originally published in American Poetry Review in 1990.

Formalist Theory

Very loosely, formalists are those who regard cinema as predominantly a manipulative medium. Out of inchoate reality the filmmaker needs to shape the material into a clearly cinematic form, and it is this shaping that allows film to be an art. Here are a few formalist statements to ground us. Bela Belázs says, for example, in The Theory of the Film, that “in order that out of the empirical fog of reality the truth…may emerge…such a maker must bring into play every means of expression available to the art of the film.” Sergei Eisenstein, meanwhile, believed, in The Film Sense, “that a work of art, understood dynamically, is just this process of arranging images in the feelings and mind of the spectator.” Another formalist critic, Rudolf Arnheim in Film as Art, mentions a scene from The Battleship Potemkin, showing “a stone lion rearing up and roaring. The scene is made from shots of three different statues of lions. First statue – a lion roaring. Second statue – a lion rising. Third statue – a lion standing with his jaws open to roar. The way the stone comes to life by the help of editing is remarkable.”

All emphasise the degree to which a film needs to be made, even though some formalists were more inclined to play down formal self-consciousness for the importance of the story to hand; others play it up. “In a good film every shot must be contributory to the action”, Arnheim believed, and went on to give an example where this wasn’t the case: where a filmmaker switches from two people in conversation taken at head height, before inexplicably switching to an overhead shot of the two characters. Meanwhile, though both V. I. Pudovkin and Eisenstein may have been Russian Formalists they disagreed on certain key points. Where Eisenstein saw cinema as dynamic and believed in Kino Fist – in a collision of images that would revolutionise the spectator; for Pudovkin, in Film Technique and Film Acting, the work of the film director was first and foremost narrative involvement: “the process of analysis, the dissection into elements, forms equally only a point of departure, that has to be followed by the assemblage of the whole from the discovered parts.” This is evident in an early fight scene in Pudovkin’s Mother, where he adds to the tension by utilising numerous close ups not just of faces, but also hands and objects, but very much for the purpose of telling the story dramatically. The degree to which the filmmaker should manipulate reality depends then on the particular theorist, but none of them would have concurred with that most famous exponent of realism, André Bazin, when he said, in an article in What is Cinema? vol II, “There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about simple cinematographic recording, on the contrary, there is progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics.”

That said, more recent formalists, like Noel Bürch, Paul Schrader, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, have drawn on Bazin to explain and explore their own interests. Schrader for example in, Transcendental Style in Film, was undeniably sympathetic to Bazin’s theological concerns, while in Figures Traced in Light, Bordwell explores the use of the long take through cinema history, a central tenet of Bazinian realism. This was however for different ends. If Bazin played up the openness of the form; Bordwell believes that “before directors wish to convey ideas or moods, evoke emotions or themes, transmit ideologies or cultural values, they must take care of some mundane business.” This mundane business is, he says in an article called ‘On Staging in Depth’, to “make their images intelligible”; in carefully directing the viewer’s attention.

What we want to look at today is the way formalist ideas can help make sense of the films under discussion, and also show how divergent formalism can be. Hiroshima mon amour was a film that signalled many of the editing innovations of the sixties, an editing schema that wanted to manipulate not on the basis of generating ideological certitude (as Eisenstein and even Pudovkin desired), but a certain perceptual confusion. After Resnais’ film came a series of works using montage in a relatively new way. Certainly there were earlier films interested in editing and subjectivity, from Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet in the twenties, to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon in the forties, but Resnais deeply problematized subjectivity in films like Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and Je t’aime, Je t’aime. Then there were numerous filmmakers who were influenced by Resnais’ style – including Joseph (Accident) Losey, John Boorman with Point Blank, and most especially Nic Roeg in Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing. This was an editing schema turning inside out the preoccupations of the early montage filmmakers who tended to undermine subjectivity.

For example, what interested Eisenstein were the masses, and he liked nothing better than ‘typage’, as we notice in Strike and The Battleship Potemkin for example. As James Monaco in How to Read a Film makes clear “…actors were to be cast not for their individual qualities but for the “types” they represented” In montage oriented films the opposite is the case, as Hiroshima mon amour, Accident, Bad Timing and even Point Blank are interested in how to capture somebody’s world from an intimate place. We can see this clearly in Hiroshima mon amour, where the flashbacks very much serve the central character’s thoughts and feelings. In one scene she starts to talk about her past to her Japanese lover, and Resnais moves steadily and sensitively into her personal history.

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Resnais, Roeg etc. were all, if you like, montage formalists, directors who made their work formally innovative first and foremost through editing. But we can also talk of mise-en-scene formalists, directors who work with elaborate long takes, like Miklos Jancso, Theo Angelopoulos and Bela Tarr. In Jancso’s The Round-Up and Red Psalm, in Angeloupolos’ Ulysses’ Gaze, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow, Bela Tarr’s Damnation, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, the filmmaker manipulates through elaborate blocking, as the camera moves around the cinematic space to create an elaborate weave that mesmerises the viewer. In each instance we feel the weight of the cut. Such an approach gives back to the word cutting its sensuous dimension. This is the long take not necessarily to reveal reality better, as Bazin proposed; more to play up the nature of film form, even to suggest links to painting over reality. This is clearly evident in the scene where the villagers evacuate their flooded houses in Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow, and it is present in the opening scene in Satantango, where a lateral track shows us a farm and animals in such a way that it dissolves as an establishing shot of an actual space, and takes on the features of abstraction as Tarr gives us a strong sense of the texture of the image in relation to what it shows us.  As Bordwell says in Figures Traced in Light: “in Angelopoulos the momentum of storytelling is invariably dissipated by dedramatization…” It is often in this dedramatization that the painterly comes through.

For more

http://tonymckibbin.com/course-notes/formalist-theory

Film Semiotics

Film semiotics is the semiotics of film; the study of signs as they pertain to film on a variety of levels. Semiotic theory focuses on the social and cultural meaning of signs and codes (Scholes, 1982; 1985). Signs consist of an image, a word, an object or even a certain type of practice. The meaning of signs depends on the relationships between the signifier (the image, word, object, or practice), the signified (the implied meaning), and the referent (what the image, word, object, or practice refers to) (Scholes, 1982). A yellow yield sign is a signifier that conveys the meaning — the signified, to yield to other cars. The referent is the actions referred to, in this case, yielding to other cars. People learn that the colors red and green as signifiers have certain signified meanings — stop and go, with the referent being stopping and starting a car on the street based on a set of cultural codes and conventions (Peim, 1993).

Concepts

Denotation and Connotation

Film communicates meaning denotatively and connotatively. What the audience sees and hears is denotative, it is what it is and they don’t have to strive to recognize it. At the same time these sounds and images are connotative and the way the scene is shot is meant to evoke certain feelings from the viewer. Connotation typically involves emotional overtones, objective interpretation, social values, and ideological assumptions. According to Christian Metz, “The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art (the “seventh art”).”  Within connotations, paradigmatic connotations exist, which would be a shot that is being compared with its unrealized companions in the paradigm. A low angle shot of a rose conveys a sense that the flower is somehow dominant or overpowering because we unconsciously compare it with an overhead shot of a rose which would diminish its importance. Syntagmatic connotation would not compare the rose shot to other potential shots but compare it with actual shots that precede or follow it. The meaning adheres to it because its compared to other shots we actually see. 

Narrative

Narrative is generally known as having two components; the story presented and the process of telling it, or narration, often referred to as narrative discourse. Film narrative theory seeks to uncover the apparently “motivated” and “natural” relationship between the signifier and the story-world in order to reveal the deeper system of cultural associations and relationships that are expressed through narrative form. As Roland Barthes has said, “narrative may be transmitted through oral or written language; through static or moving images, through gestures and through an organized mixture of all these substances. There is narrative in myth, legend, fables, fairytales, novellas, novels, history, novel, epos, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, pictures, comics, events and conversation. In these unlimited forms, narrative exists at all times, in all corners of the earth, in all societies. Narrative begins with the history of mankind.” Films use a combination of dialog, sounds, visual images, gestures and actions to create the narrative. Narrators, usually in a voice-over format, are very popular in documentary film and greatly assist in telling the story while accompanying powerful shots.

Tropes

Metonymy refers to the ability of a sign to represent something entirely, while literally only being a part of it. An example of this is the Eiffel Tower, which is a metonym for Paris. Film uses metonyms frequently because they rely on the external to reveal the internal. Another powerful semiotic tool for filmmaking is the use of metaphors, which are defined as a comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. In film, a pair of consecutive shots is metaphorical when there is an implied comparison of the two shots. For instance, a shot of an airplane followed by a shot of a bird flying would be metaphorical, implying that the airplane is (or is like) a bird.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rbeach/teachingmedia/module4/4.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_semiotics

Semiotic Analysis

The study of these signs, codes and conventions in movies is called semiotics. Semiotic analysis is a way to explain how we make meaning from codes – all meaning is encoded in that which creates the meaning. No object or word goes without a meaning – we cannot read or see something without associating it to a certain idea – the meaning. In our youths, we have all been taught how to decode what we see, read and hear, we have all learned to decode meaning.

However, what we should realize is that the decoded meaning is not our own idea, but somebody else’s. For example. If you read the word “failure”, you decode it by relating it to the value your culture adheres to the concept of failure and its antonym – success. Although it’s not said we cannot create meaning on our own, 99% percent of the time, the meaning comes from some pre-established (cultural) idea. For instance, the colour red simply denotes a colour, but in a certain context it can connote emotion, like anger, or love. These codes are often used in media to reinforce, subtly, the way audiences should think about certain things or how they should behave. These are a culture’s dominant ideologies. For instance, a long-standing cultural ideology is that diamonds (or chocolate) symbolise love and that people should give this to your significant other as proof of their love for the other.

These codes are groups of signs that seem to fit together naturally. Together, they create meaning. To stick to the signs and codes of romance: the sign of a broken heart means lost love, and if you add the broken heart to the signs of two people, the three signs together, the code, anyone will read into it that the couple has broken off their relationship.

Filmic Code

Four types of signs and codes exist in semiotic analysis of film:

Indexical Signs

These are the most basic of signs in film. Indexical signs indirectly point to a certain meaning – they act as cues to existing knowledge. For example, smoke means fire, panting means exercise, a ringing bell means end of class. This type of signs is constantly used in (all types of) media and are very common.

Symbolic Code

Symbolic codes often denote something they have nothing to do with at first glance, but only because the code exists and because we use them society-wide. For instance, the red heart symbolises love, the white dove symbolises peace, the colour green symbolises jealousy.

Iconic Signs and Code

These are the literal signs and codes: a cop means a cop. They are meant to appear like the thing itself. However, they always represent more than just the thing itself. When we see a cop, we also associate this with our cultural ideas of “justice” or “the law”, or even masculinity or toughness. These codes also reinforce the ideas we have about these concepts in our culture, it reinforces the ideological meaning of those concepts.

Enigma Code

This is an important type of code used in film: it creates a question which the film “text” will then go on to answer. This is often used in trailers of movies as well as posters. They make people wonder. For example, “who murdered the protagonist”, or “how will they survive the apocalypse”. They pique curiosity and intrigue the viewers, with the intention of making them go see the movie.

Convention

Convention is another important concept that you’ll see discussed frequently in film analysis. It indicates the “establishment”, the established way of doing something, or understanding something, or presenting something.

They are the generally accepted norms. It’s behaviour and ideas that we see as natural; they’re so deeply embedded in culture that we’re generally not aware of them, and definitely don’t realise what their effect is, or how they affect us. In film, conventions are used to represent certain topics, characters and events, and more. When you start to scrutinise these conventions, you’ll find that, often, they are used to shape how we think about a character or event. When it comes to characters, conventions can easily turn into stereotypes.

You will find that they don’t always represent reality, and can even be harmful to how audiences perceive the world. A common convention, for instance, is how Muslims are always terrorists, and to state the obvious, that’s not the case in reality. Indians don’t always have thick Indian accents, especially when they were born outside of India. Nonetheless, these are stereotypes you will find in film abundantly. Other common conventions can be found in how women are portrayed in film. For instance, in film noir, female leads are either the helpless dame in distress, or the femme fatale – there is rarely an in-between. Nowadays, women are still frequently portrayed as damsels in distress, though while we see more female superheroes, they are generally clad in tight outfits, and their characters are underdeveloped; they are just there to serve the male main character’s plot.

https://www.filminquiry.com/analyse-movies-signs/

Psychoanalytic film theory

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes of the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The First wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Psychoanalysis was created, Film followed shortly after. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, saw film as a means of engaging the unconscious. Since films had the ability to tell a story using techniques such as superimposition, and slow motion, the Surrealists saw this as mimicking dreams.

Early applications of psychoanalysis to cinema concentrated on unmasking latent meanings behind screen images, before moving on to a consideration of film as a representation of fantasy. From there, a wider consideration of the subject position of the viewer led to wider engagements with critical theory - to psychoanalytic film theory proper. Freud's concepts of the Oedipus complex, narcissism, castration, the unconscious, the return, and hysteria are all utilized in film theory. The 'unconscious' of a film are examined; this is known as subtext.

Gaze

Gaze means "to look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention.

In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of the "gaze" in the cinema, Metz stressing the viewer's identification with the camera's vision, - an identification largely "constructed" by the film itself - and Mulvey the fetishistic aspects of (especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body. The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image, although Lacanian theory also indicates that identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence (aphanisis).

A second wave of psychoanalytic film criticism associated with Jacqueline Rose emphasised the search for the missing object of desire on the part of the spectator: in Elisabeth Cowie's words, "the pleasure of fantasy lies in the setting out, not in the having of the objects". As post-structuralism took an increasingly pragmatic approach to the possibilities Theory offered, so too Joan Copjec criticised early work around the gaze in the light of the work of Michel Foucault. The role of trauma in cinematic representation came more to the fore, and Lacanian analysis was seen to offer fertile ways of speaking of film rather than definitive answers or conclusive self-knowledge.

Reference

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. 207-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_film_theory

Marxist film theory

Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage. While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of the cinema of the United States.

Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over. Eisenstein himself, however, was accused by the Soviet authorities under Joseph Stalin of "formalist error," of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.

French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas. Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni [Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire] with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his dispossessed daily life.

Situationist film makers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973) a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and Proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.

Marxist film theory has developed from these precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_film_theory

Formalist film theory

Formalist film theory is a theory of film study that is focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film: i.e., the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. It is a major theory of film study today. Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the individual elements. For example, take the single element of editing. A formalist might study how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or jump cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile. Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a notable example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style. Ideologues focus on how socio-economic pressures create a particular style, and auteurists on how auteurs put their own stamp on the material. Formalism is primarily concerned with style and how it communicates ideas, emotions, and themes (rather than, as critics of formalism point out, concentrating on the themes of a work itself).

Ideological formalism 

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible. The socio-economic ideological explanation for this is, quite crassly, that Hollywood wants to make as much money and appeal to as many ticket-buyers as possible.

Film noir, which was given its name by Nino Frank, is marked by lower production values, darker images, under lighting, location shooting, and general nihilism: this is because, we are told, during the war and post-war years filmmakers (as well as filmgoers) were generally more pessimistic. Also, the German Expressionists (including Fritz Lang, who was not technically an expressionist as popularly believed emigrated to America and brought their stylized lighting effects (and disillusionment due to the war) to American soil.

It can be argued that, by this approach, the style or 'language' of these films is directly affected not by the individuals responsible, but by social, economic, and political pressures, of which the filmmakers themselves may be aware or not. It is this branch of criticism that gives us such categories as the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent movement, the New American independent movement, the new queer cinema, and the French, German, and Czech new waves.

Formalism in auteur theory

First, it was created to redeem the art of film itself. By arguing that films had auteurs, or authors, Truffaut sought to make films (and their directors) at least as important as the more widely accepted art forms, such as literature, music, and painting. Each of these art forms, and the criticism thereof, is primarily concerned with a sole creative force: the author of a novel (not, for example, his editor or type-setter), the composer of a piece of music (though sometimes the performers are given credence, akin to actors in film today), or the painter of a fresco (not his assistants who mix the colours or often do some of the painting themselves). By elevating the director, and not the screenwriter, to the same importance as novelists, composers, or painters, it sought to free the cinema from its popular conception as a bastard art, somewhere between theater and literature.

Secondly, it sought to redeem many filmmakers who were looked down upon by mainstream film critics. It argued that genre filmmakers and low-budget B-movies were just as important, if not more, than the prestige pictures commonly given more press and legitimacy in France and the United States. According to Truffaut's theory, auteurs took material that was beneath their talents—a thriller, a pulpy action film, a romance—and, through their style, put their own personal stamp on it.

It is this auteur style that concerns formalism.

A perfect example of formalist criticism of auteur style would be the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock primarily made thrillers, which, according to the Cahiers du cinema crowd, were popular with the public but were dismissed by the critics and the award ceremonies, although Hitchcock's Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1940 Academy Awards. Though he never won the Oscar for directing, he was nominated five times in the category. Truffaut and his colleagues argued that Hitchcock had a style as distinct as that of Flaubert or Van Gogh: the virtuoso editing, the lyrical camera movements, the droll humour. He also had "Hitchcockian" themes: the wrong man falsely accused, violence erupting at the times it was least expected, the cool blonde. Now, Hitchcock is more or less universally lauded, his films dissected shot-by-shot, his work celebrated as being that of a master. And the study of this style, his variations, and obsessions all fall quite neatly under the umbrella of formalist film theory.

Reference

Bordwell, David, "Film Art: An Introduction"; McGraw-Hill; 7th edition (June, 2003).

Braudy, Leo, ed., "Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings"; Oxford University Press; 6th edition (March, 2004).

Gianetti, Louis, "Understanding Movies"; Prentice Hall; 10th edition (March, 2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalist_film_theory

Feminist film theory

Feminist film theory is theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.

The development of feminist film theory was influenced by second wave feminism and the development of women's studies in the 1960s and '70s. Feminist scholars began taking cues from the new theories arising from these movements to analyzing film. Initial attempts in the United States in the early 1970s were generally based on sociological theory and focused on the function of women characters in particular film narratives or genres and of stereotypes as a reflection of a society's view of women. Works such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze how the women portrayed in film related to the broader historical context, the stereotypes depicted, the extent to which the women were shown as active or passive, and the amount of screen time given to women.

In contrast, film theoreticians in England began integrating perspectives based on critical theory and drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism. Eventually these ideas gained hold within the American scholarly community in the later 1970s and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on what was described as "the production of meaning in a film text, the way a text constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect the representation of women and reinforce sexism".

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey is best known for her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. The essay later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

In his essay from The Imaginary Signifier, "Identification, Mirror," Christian Metz argues that viewing film is only possible through scopophilia (pleasure from looking, related to voyeurism), which is best exemplified in silent film.

According to Cynthia A. Freeland in "Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films," feminist studies of horror films have focused on psychodynamics where the chief interest is "on viewers' motives and interests in watching horror films". More recently, scholars have expanded their work to include analysis of television and digital media. Additionally, they have begun to explore notions of difference, engaging in dialogue about the differences among women (part of movement away from essentialism in feminist work more generally), the various methodologies and perspectives contained under the umbrella of feminist film theory, and the multiplicity of methods and intended effects that influence the development of films. Scholars are also taking increasingly global perspectives, responding to postcolonialist criticisms of perceived Anglo- and Eurocentrism in the academy more generally. Increased focus has been given to, "disparate feminisms, nationalisms, and media in various locations and across class, racial, and ethnic groups throughout the world".

Realism and counter cinema

The early work of Marjorie Rosen and Molly Haskell on representation of women in film was part of a movement to make depictions of women more realistic both in documentaries and narrative cinema. The growing female presence in the film industry was seen as a positive step toward realizing this goal, by drawing attention to feminist issues and putting forth alternative, more true-to-life views of women. However, Rosen and Haskell argue that these images are still mediated by the same factors as traditional film, such as the "moving camera, composition, editing, lighting, and all varieties of sound." While acknowledging the value in inserting positive representations of women in film, some critics asserted that real change would only come about from reconsidering the role of film in society, often from a semiotic point of view.

Claire Johnston put forth the idea that women's cinema can function as "counter cinema". Through consciousness of the means of production and opposition of sexist ideologies, films made by women have the potential to posit an alternative to traditional Hollywood films. In reaction to this article, many women filmmakers have integrated "alternative forms and experimental techniques" to "encourage audiences to critique the seemingly transparent images on the screen and to question the manipulative techniques of filming and editing".

Reference

Erens, Patricia. “Introduction” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Patricia Erens, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Braudy and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, Sixth Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004

McHugh, Kathleen and Vivian Sobchack. “Introduction: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms.

Johnston, Claire. "Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema." Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film. Patricia Erens, ed. New York: Horizon Press, 1979

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory

Auteur

An auteur (French: [o.tœʁ], author) is a singular artist who controls all aspects of a collaborative creative work, a person equivalent to the author of a novel or a play. The term is commonly referenced to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation. Auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s as a value system that derives from the cinematic theories of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc—dubbed auteur theory by American film critic Andrew Sarris. Such critics invented the concept as a way of distinguishing French New Wave filmmakers from studio system directors that were part of the Hollywood establishment. Auteur theory has since been applied to producers of popular music, as well as directors of video games.

The definition of an auteur has been debated since the 1940s. André Bazin and Roger Leenhardt presented the theory that it is the director that brings the film to life and uses the film to express their thoughts and feelings about the subject matter as well as a worldview as an auteur. An auteur can use lighting, camerawork, staging and editing to add to their vision.

Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticising auteur theory's focus on the authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris feuded in the pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. One reason for the backlash is the collaborative aspect of shooting a film, and in the theory's privileging of the role of the director (whose name, at times, has become more important than the movie itself). In Kael's "Raising Kane" (1971), an essay written on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, she points out how the film made extensive use of the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland.

Some screenwriters have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial than screenwriters, while film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the creative input of producers and studio executives in classical Hollywood, argues that the auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system". In 2006, David Kipen coined the term Schreiber theory to refer to the theory of the screenwriter as the principal author of a film.

Reference

Santas 2002, p. 18.

Min, Joo & Kwak 2003, p. 85.

Caughie 2013, pp. 22–34, 62–66.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (n.d.). "Auteur theory". Encyclopedia Britannica.

Thompson & Bordwell 2010, pp. 381–383.

Kael, Pauline, "Raising Kane", The New Yorker, February 20, 1971.

Apparatus theory

Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s, following the 1960s when psychoanalytical theories for film were popular.

Apparatus theory maintains that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological and because the films are created to represent reality. Its mechanics of representation include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the composition is also ideological. In the simplest instance the cinematic apparatus purports to set before the eye and ear realistic images and sounds. However, the technology disguises how that reality is put together frame by frame. The meaning of a film, plus the way the viewing subject is constructed and the mechanics of the actual process and production of making the film affect the representation of the subject. Apparatus theory also states that within the text's perspective, the central position of the viewer is ideological. This effect is ideological because it is a reproduced reality and the cinematic experience affects the viewer on a deep level. This theory is explored in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry. This is where the Marxist aspect of the theory comes into play. The idea is that the passive viewers (or Marx's proletariat) cannot tell the difference between the world of cinema and film and the real world. These viewers identify with the characters on screen so strongly that they become susceptible to ideological positioning. In Baudry's theory of the apparatus he likens the movie-goer to someone in a dream. He relates the similarities of being in a darkened room, having someone else control your actions/what you do, and the inactivity and passivity of the two activities. He goes on to say that because movie-goers are not distracted by outside light, noise, etc., due to the nature of a movie theater, they are able to experience the film as if it were reality and they were experiencing the events themselves. Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the dominant ideology of the culture within the viewer. Ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature and it shapes the way the audience thinks.

Apparatus theorists

• Gregory Ulmer

• Louis Althusser - Marxist writer who wrote about mirror mis-recognition and the role it plays in forming identities, to explore the relationship between cinema goers and film texts.

• Jean-Louis Comolli

• Christian Metz - argued that viewing film is only possible by voyeurism (or ‘scopophila’: Greek for love of looking), best seen in silent film.

• Giorgio Agamben

• Laura Mulvey

• Peter Wollen

• Jean-Louis Baudry - argued that film theory was metaphysical.

Reference

Ponsford, Nicole. "Film Theory and Language". Media.Edu. Media.edu. Retrieved 4 December 2014.

"Cinematic apparatus". faculty.washington.edu. Retrieved 4 December 2014.

Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press, 1986.

Philosophy of film

The philosophy of language film analysis is a form of film analysis that studies the aesthetics of film by investigating the concepts and practices that comprise the experience and interpretation of movies. It is based on the philosophical tradition begun by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Critics from this tradition often clarify misconceptions used in theoretical film studies and instead produce analysis of a film's vocabulary and its link to a form of life.

The earliest person to explore philosophical questions regarding film was Hugo Münsterberg. During the silent film era, he sought to understand what it was about film that made it conceptually distinct from theater. He concluded that the use of close-ups, flash-backs, and edits were unique to film and constituted its nature. Rudolf Arnheim, with the beginning of the era of sound for film, argued that the silent film era was aesthetically superior to the "talkies". He held that by adding sound to previously silent moving images, the unique status of film had been removed. Instead of being a unique art form that could carefully study bodies in motion, film had become merely a combination of two other art forms. André Bazin, contrary to Arnheim, held that whether or not a film has sound is largely irrelevant. He believed that film, due mainly to its foundation in and relationship with photography, had a realist aspect to it. He argued that film has the ability to capture the real world. The film Waking Life also features a discussion of the philosophy of film where the theories of Bazin are emphasized. In it, the character waxes philosophic that every moment of film is capturing an aspect of God.

American philosopher Noël Carroll has argued that the earlier characterizations of film made by philosophers too narrowly defined the nature of film and that they incorrectly conflated aspects of genres of films with film in general. Aspects of Bazin's realist theories have been accepted by philosophers in spite of Carroll's critique. The transparency thesis, which says that film is a medium transparent to true reality, has been accepted by Kendall Walton.

Reference

Richard Allen, "Cognitive Film Theory," in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-22875-1 ISBN 978-0415228756

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); 2nd enlarged edn. (1979) ISBN 0-674-96196-X ISBN 978-0674961968

Stephen Mulhall, On film, London/New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-24795-0 ISBN 9780415247955

Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.ISBN 140394900X ISBN 978-1-4039-4900-4

Film Theory

Film theory aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though there can be some crossover between the three disciplines.

French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896) has been cited as anticipating the development of film theory during the birth of cinema. Bergson commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice; English: The cinematic illusion in Creative Evolution), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983–1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form. In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academia importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics. However, not until the late 1980s or early 1990s did film theory per se achieve much prominence in American universities by displacing the prevailing humanistic, auteur theory that had dominated cinema studies and which had been focused on the practical elements of film writing, production, editing and criticism. American scholar David Bordwell has spoken against many prominent developments in film theory since the 1970s, i.e., he uses the derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to film studies based on the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes. Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes as "neoformalism."

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has influenced film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an "indexical" image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of "the Real", Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of "the gaze" extensively used in contemporary film analysis. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.

In Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), Clive Meyer suggests that 'cinema is a different experience to watching a film at home or in an art gallery', and argues for film theorists to re-engage the specificity of philosophical concepts for cinema as a medium distinct from others.

Philosophy of Film" by Thomas Wartenberg - first published Aug. 18, 2004; substantive revision Nov. 25, 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Reference

Robert Stam, Film Theory: an introduction", Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

André Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Weddle, David. "Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology: Film School Isn't What It Used to Be, One Father Discovers." Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2003; URL retrieved 22 Jan 2011.

Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2000.

Laurie, Timothy (2013), "Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice", Media International Australia, 147: 171

Define Film Studies

Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation.

The critic of film in an academic setting has not existed through the entire history of film. Not to be confused with the technical aspects of film creation, film studies exists only with the creation of film theory—which approaches film critically as an art—and the writing of film historiography. Because the modern film became an invention and industry only in the late nineteenth century, a generation of simply created films by self-investigative producers and directors existed significantly before the academic analysis that followed in later generations.

Early film schools focused on the production and subjective critique of film rather than on the critical approaches, history and theory used to study academically. Since the time film was created, the concept of film studies as a whole grew to analyze the formal aspects of film as they were created. Established in 1919 the Moscow Film School was the first school in the world to focus on film. In the United States the USC School of Cinematic Arts, established in 1929, was the first cinematic based school, which was created in agreement with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They were also the first to offer a major in film in 1932 but without the distinctions that are assumed in film studies. Universities began to implement different forms of cinema related curriculum without, however, the division between the abstract and practical approaches.

A movement away from Hollywood productions in the 1950s turned cinema into a more artistic independent endeavour. It was the creation of the auteur theory, which asserted film as the director's vision and art that prompted film studies to become truly considered academically worldwide in the 1960s. In 1965, film critic Robin Wood, in his writings on Alfred Hitchcock, declared that Hitchcock's films contained the same complexities of Shakespeare's plays.

Film as an art?

Reference

Dyer, Richard. "Introduction." Film Studies: Critical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 1-8. Print.

Sikov, Ed. "Introduction." Introduction pg.1-4. Film Studies: an Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print. Google Books